26 June, 2017

Exploitation of children in propaganda war against Syria continues

Effective
war propaganda tugs at the heart strings, using many tactics,
including adorable children in threatening situations, or dead, and
comes hand in hand with condemnations for crimes committed,
allegedly, by the villain(s) being caricatured. In the following
instances, children being injured or murdered did occur, but the
condemnations were muted or not at all.

A few weeks
prior to the photo of Omran Daqneesh going viral as the poster child
for suffering in Syria, terrorists of the Nour al-Din al-Zenki
faction beheaded a boy said to be around 12 years old.

Although the
decapitators filmed the entire savage act, posing for gleeful selfies
as they tortured the boy prior to murdering him, leaders and media in
the US took little notice of the horrific slaughter. Ten days after
the questionable events which led to the light injury of Omran, two
young boys in the Idlib villages of Foua and Kafraya were shot in
their head and neck respectively by a sniper from Jaysh al-Fateh
terrorists in the village of Binnish close by. The injuries were
serious. They were rendered even more serious given that the villages
had been completely surrounded and fully under siege by terrorists
since March 2015.

In April
2017, a convoy of children, women, elderly and ill being evacuated
from Foua were attacked by a terrorist explosion, with reports over
200 murdered, including 116 children. The attack included luring with
potato chips and filming children in the convoy before later blowing
them up and claiming to be rescuing them. Not only did these
terrorists murder civilians and children, but they staged the scene
to then look like heroes.

Indeed, in
the West this massacre was called a “hiccup” and little
denunciation was made about the vast numbers of dead, let alone the
injured.

In October,
2016, Press TV was one of the few outlets to report on another
adorable Aleppo boy, Mahmoud, “a six-year-old Syrian boy who was
born without arms, and recently lost both of his legs after stepping
on a mine planted by militants in Syria’s Aleppo.” The report
includes scenes of Mahmoud showing his resilience, adjusting to life
without any limbs. But for corporate media, Mahmoud’s were the
wrong villains.

Terrorist
bombings and snipings have killed children in schools and homes
throughout Syria over the years, including the October 2014 terrorist
car and suicide bombing of the Akrama Al-Makhzoumi School in Homs,
killing at least 41 children by conservative estimates, or up to 48
children by other reports, along with women and other civilians, as
well as attacks on Aleppo schools, as I detailed earlier.

In Aleppo
and in Damascus, I have visited numerous hospitals and seen endless
poster children of suffering in Syria. The differences between these
children and those which Western and Gulf media present us, is that
these children were murdered, rendered critically-injured, or maimed
by the bombs, mortars and snipings of terrorists which the West
presents as “moderate rebels”, so their stories will never be
front page, much less heard.